Hot Air Balloonist Stays Earthbound on Indonesian Island

Andre Graff spent more than 20 years as a hot-air balloonist flying over the Earth. Today, in search of water on one of Indonesia’s poorest islands, he’s digging into it.

Mr. Graff, 55 years old, has spent the past eight years on the Indonesian island of Sumba, largely engaged in the pursuit of life’s most essential substance. In a heavily populated but poorly developed area where villages often sit more than a kilometer away from water sources, he spends many of his days digging wells and developing ways to pump and deliver the new sources of water he finds.

The trials and successes of Mr. Graff offer a template for more adventurous foreign visitors who are eager to explore one of the world’s most expansive and diverse nations. They also underscore how for all of Indonesia’s growth in recent years, many areas remain under-developed, with grinding poverty and few signs of the wealth that is transforming places such as Jakarta and Bali where most of the country’s expatriates live.

Advertisement

Mr. Graff, instead, lives alone on the outskirts of the village of Waru Wora, in a modest, two-level home of bamboo, straw and concrete blocks. His luxuries include a laptop, mobile phone and, starting this year, a connection to the state electricity grid. He has no affiliation with a particular institution or any business of his own in Indonesia, living off of rental earnings from the home he owns in France.

He has become a fixture in the local community, going by a number of shamanic names bestowed upon him by villagers across the island. He lives, as many Sumbanese do, with regular bouts of malaria.

“I never intended to come here and stay,” he said recently when reached by phone. “But always in my life, meeting people along my journey is what made the choices for me. Now I feel I’ve learned more in eight years in Sumba than I did in 47 years in Europe.”

Sumba’s water problem is broadly representative of the challenges that Indonesia faces. The sprawling nature of the archipelago, home to more than 240 million people, makes it hard for distant regions to see the benefits of development elsewhere. A program of decentralization, begun with the fall of Suharto, has given more power to local governments to control their budgets, but still the income and social gaps between places like Sumba and Java are growing as many people choose to migrate to Indonesia’s centers of commerce rather than develop far-flung isles.

Government antipoverty programs can be found throughout the province, and numerous local nongovernmental organizations have tried to dig wells and store water. But those programs haven’t been enough to ensure everyone has ready access to fresh water. Mr. Graff points to scores of discarded, empty water containers around the island as evidence of poor planning. “It’s the sedimentation of help programs,” he says. “Nobody has the patience to put things to work for the long-term.” He has seen evidence of the failed programs in the scores of empty water containers “burning in the sun” around the island.

Mr. Graff, who hails from the scenic Alsace region of northeastern France, stumbled upon Sumba in 2004 after a case of Lyme disease caused him to end a two-decade career running his own hot-air balloon company. With a mind to pursuing new adventures—“to stay in France just to benefit from the health scheme wasn’t really my cup of tea”—he took a vacation to Bali and ended up on a three-week boat tour of East Nusa Tenggara, some 500 kilometers further east.

“I really fell in love with the area,” he says. “And little by little I came to know the difficulties of the people I met. Especially the problem of getting water.”

Almost half of households in East Nusa Tenggara rely on springs for their primary source of water—the highest rate for any province in Indonesia—and walks of more than a kilometer to rivers and springs are often the norm. In some places the streams dry up entirely in the dry season. Meanwhile, many communities lack the funding and skills necessary to build more wells.

In an area where the poverty rate is double the country’s average, other basic services are also in short supply. Electricity has a low penetration rate, and a sizeable portion of Sumba’s more than 600,000 inhabitants live with regular bouts of malaria and tuberculosis.

Mr. Graff returned to Sumba a year after his boat trip. In Waru Wora, he taught himself how to build simple but durable wells, drawing upon past study of agronomy and a balloonist’s knowledge of meteorology to learn about the island’s hydrology. He dug dozens of wells, most of them built for between seven million rupiah and 15 million rupiah, or between $730 and $1560, with a small cooperative he formed. The projects were funded with a mix of his own money, donations to his charity in France, and, as word of his work caught on, funds from local government.

Wells can take from two weeks to two months to build, depending on the money available and the challenges of a particular location, and he seeks government permission before undertaking any project. He uses his own tools acquired over the years, casting the concrete rings that make up a well’s body at his home, out of sight of the village proper.

In 2011 he shifted gears and built a new solar-powered pump to push well water straight to the taps of some 800 people, a feat that’s drawn the interest of officials in neighboring districts.

“The things he does work,” says Kornelis Kodi Mete, the district head of Southwest Sumba. “He’s a part of the community. It may sound a little odd to people in Jakarta, but he’s really had a positive impact on people here, and he’s welcome wherever he goes.”

Mr. Graff says he can spend up to 18 hours a day working on his projects during the dry season, when it’s easier to dig. In between projects, or when the weather is poor, he spends his time emailing, working on his home and socializing. Several times a year he travels to Jakarta, Bali or Singapore. He hasn’t been home to France in years.

Mr. Graff studied biology at Université Louis-Pasteur in his native Alsace, and in the late 1970s he was a part of the “back-to-earth” movement, living for a time on farms across Europe. He was an occasional activist who participated in humanitarian convoys, including, he says, one that made him the first balloonist to fly into Romania.

His motivation, he says, comes from seeing the lives of his neighbors change when hours of a day aren’t devoted to gathering water. He speaks in romantic terms, calling himself less a Frenchman than “an inhabitant of planet Earth,” and describing as a “poetic existence” the excitement of watching lives change.

But he’s also a realist when it comes to his efforts in Sumba. “Perfection is not the goal. You never have the ideal situation anywhere, and the problem of water will never be fully solved anywhere in the world.”

Mr. Graff says he has no particular plans to remain in Sumba for the rest of his days, just as he has no plans to leave. But for now he says he has enough to do that he’ll maintain his jungle address for at least a couple more years.

“When I was young I thought like young people do that I would have a career,” he says. “Now I think it’s much more fun just to let things come.”

About Southeast Asia Real Time

Indonesia Real Time provides analysis and insight into the region, which includes Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Brunei. Contact the editors at SEAsia@wsj.com.

Jakarta residents share their views on how Gov. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama has been running Jakarta and whether they're worried about plans by city council to investigate his handling of this year's budget.